No, we thought, our father was wrong. Once the novelty wore off, no one would be dumb enough to do this.
* * *
Our mother’s reputation had grown since Patterns of Affinity was published, in the invisible （to us, though we’d only just left it） world of the university. She got tenure quickly and was beloved by her students, whom she fed pots of beef-and-lentil stew at the bungalow where she lived with Marco, a colleague she’d fallen in love with.
Shortly after the music industry went into free fall exactly as our father had predicted, he had a stroke that left him dragging his right leg. Our mother shared our woe at seeing him in such a state. Your poor father, she said. How can I help? On weekends, she and Marco brought nuts and oranges and cracked crab to the house—gifts for us as well as for our father.
You girls are too young to shoulder all this, she kept telling us, but how could we not try? In frantic league, we flailed for ways to end the “sharing” that was dismantling our father’s business and our father. We contemplated a nationwide billboard campaign to remind people of that eternal law, Nothing is free! Only children expect otherwise, even as myths and fairy tales warn us: Rumpelstiltskin, King Midas, Hansel and Gretel. Never trust a candy house! It was only a matter of time before someone made them pay for what they thought they were getting for free. Why could nobody see this?
Our father’s strokes—six in all—seemed a barbarous enactment of the assault that mass-marauding theft was visiting upon the industry he’d helped to shape. First he limped; then was paralyzed on one side; then confined to bed, hardly able to speak. Our house became a hospital and finally a hospice, with round-the-clock care and opium drips. We enlisted Bennie Salazar’s help to bring people who had loved our father to say goodbye. Even Jocelyn came. She and a high school friend wheeled his bed to the pool and stood beside him as he eyed the gray water.
At some point in the course of our grief and frustration—our helplessness at watching our father reel, then buckle—we drifted from seeking ways to warn people of the Faustian bargain they were making, to hungering for their punishment.
* * *
Neither of us remembered who read Patterns of Affinity first. It may have been simultaneous, as so many things were for the two of us, for so long. Nor did we recall what moved us finally to open those slender volumes that had lain untouched on a shelf since 1995.
Patterns of Affinity introduces, with elegant simplicity, formulas for predicting human inclinations. In order to work, the algorithms require intimate knowledge of the individuals in question: a breadth of information that our mother could acquire only in a remote, insular community where the history of each member was known to all the rest. At the book’s conclusion, she speculates that her formulas’ predictive powers could, theoretically, be applied to people living in a complex, mobile environment … but doing so would require exhaustive personal information that would be impossible to acquire in a modern setting without posing an array of intrusive questions whose answers few people, if any, would be willing to supply.
Wrong, we thought. They’re giving it away for a song.
* * *
Let the record show that we did nothing without our mother’s explicit permission.
Whatever I’ve done belongs to you, she told us. Use it any way you like, and by all means, try to help your poor father.
In fairness, she had no idea what we were asking.
But she never retreated from that position—at least not to our faces—even after we’d patented her algorithms and sold them to the social media giants whose names we all know. Later, she spurned the credit that Bix Bouton and the others tried to give her, and she used her unwanted pop stardom to rail against the invasiveness of data gathering and manipulation, to insist on the deeply private nature of human experience, etc., etc. Still, she kept us out of it. She never once spoke our names in public or acknowledged, even to us, that we’d made a tragedy of her career by perverting her theory to bring about the end of private life.